The German voice was now as loud as Billy’s own on the intercom. If anything, louder. It might have been inside the plane with us.
‘I am a hundred metres behind him now, and twenty metres beneath. My guns are cocked.’
‘Anything?’ said Dadda.
‘Nothing,’ said Billy. ‘Not a dicky bird behind us.’ But the voice had infected us all. I tried Monica again, though I knew it was pointless.
Nothing.
Even Dadda banked the crate left and right, to get a look underneath.
Nothing. But we all shuddered, waiting for the death of the unknown Wimpey. Was it one of our lot? Probably we should never know.
And then a new voice broke in, loud, a shout, full of fear.
‘Blackham – corkscrew port – fighter below you!’
‘For God’s sake, stop shouting, Gary!’ said Dadda abruptly. I didn’t answer. It was my voice; but I hadn’t opened my mouth. It was my voice, a month old, coming out of the dark, out of the past. Calling to Blackham, who at this moment was lying in a bed in Colchester mental hospital. And no wonder the night-fighter’s voice seemed familiar. It wasn’t just a German voice. It was Gehlen’s voice. Burnt Gehlen, who we had seen blown in pieces all over Germany.
Then another voice, exultant. ‘I got the bastard! I got him!’ Geranium, dead a month, with a hole in his chest.
‘You sure?’ Blackham, very Yorkshire-tyke.
‘Sure I’m sure. See him burn!’ Geranium.
Wild cheers. From Coade, Spann, Brennan and Beales. Dead in a turnip field near Chelmsford.
‘Bullfinch Three to Bullfinch. Abandoning aircraft. Port wing on fire. Get the hatch open, Meissner . . .’ Gehlen. Dead, burnt Gehlen.
‘Shut the bloody RT off, Gary!’ Only slowly, I realized it was Dadda talking to me, in the present day. But it was Kit who reached over and turned off the intercom, plunging us into the blessed silence of the engine’s roar. When he looked at me, his blue eyes above the oxygen mask were showing white all round. I was shaking from head to foot. My hand shook so much I couldn’t undo my mask. Then I was sick, and the spew built up inside it and cascaded over the top. At least it was real and warm and alive.
The next thing I knew, and that, too, came to me very slowly, as in a dream, was that Dadda had put the Wimpey into a hell of a dive. Either that, or we’d been mortally hit. Frankly, I didn’t care. I just hung on like a drowning man to a lifebelt. But we pulled out, and I could tell from the movement of the crate that Dadda was ground-hopping. What else could he do to stay alive, with the intercom gone and all his crew, gunners and all, sitting in a paralysed funk? Any night-fighter could have come up behind and stolen our braces and we wouldn’t have noticed.
Kit recovered first, as he always did. Bundled past me with a new course for Dadda to fly. That kid was incredible. I sat huddled, cold and still shaking, over the end of the heating-hose; I held it up my jacket, against my crotch. It was a help. I watched the odd trail of tracer flying past the triangular windows, with the innocent wonder of a small child on a railway journey. Nothing came very near. Dadda was giving Jerry very little chance, as usual. Kit came bundling back to his navigator’s table and settled to a problem, face very serious. As usual, it was a comfort to watch him. How did people get to have guts like him and Dadda? I must have been at the back of the queue when they were handing out guts.
It was then that I noticed that my RT dials were starting to glow up again. Had I knocked the switch back on, without knowing what I was doing? I reached to switch it off again.
It was switched off.
But the dials continued to glow up. I gave a noiseless moan, as sound filtered into my earphones. Faint cheers.
‘Burn, you bastard, burn!’
An incoherent scream from Gehlen. Kit shoved me aside and reached for the off-switch. It was still off. His eyes creased up over his mask. He tried the switch the other way, and the sound of Gehlen’s screams grew louder. He turned it to the off position again. Back and forwards he twisted it, back and forwards, faster and faster. But still the voice of Gehlen grew.
‘Mutti, mutti.’
Kit went berserk then. He grabbed the heavy-duty cables that led to the radio set from the crate’s main batteries. Tore them out of their housings on the airframe. Tried to pull them out of the radio with brute force. Then he reached for a pair of rescue shears.
God, he would go up in a blue light! We’d all go up in a blue light, if the naked ends of the cut wires touched the airframe. Frantically, I tried to wrestle the shears away from him. We were still fighting like maniacs when Dadda separated us. We stood in a triangle, mouthing soundless screams at each other.
Dadda took a rescue hammer and smashed the shut-off RT set. The sparks flew, I can tell you; lucky the hammer had a rubber handle. Silence. The soundless noise of the engines once again closed like a fleecy blanket over our ears. Dadda went back to the cockpit. Kit and I sat and stared at each other. I don’t think either of us expected the world to make sense any more. We had got accustomed to living in a nightmare. Kit even produced a flask of coffee and offered me a cup. Coffee in a nightmare. But it still tasted like real coffee – as real as wartime coffee ever is.
We looked at our watches. Kit mimed, ‘Half an hour to the Dutch coast.’ Then he turned his head to look at a section of the airframe, puzzled. It was vibrating oddly, under our backsides, under our ungloved hands. Had we been hit? Had the engines developed trouble, or gone out of synch?
No, it was more like the rhythms of speech. Voices talking. A voice . . .
Suddenly, the voice burst through again, like fire from a hosed-down plane; a fire the firemen thought they had under control.
‘Meissner, Ritter! What’s holding you up? Are you dead?’
And then the screams, the godawful, burning screams, drowning the noise of the engines, shaking the airframe, tearing at every joint in our bodies. Nothing, nothing left in the world but screaming.
‘Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’
Kit and I clung together, held on to each other in a barricade of arms, of living flesh and bones. There was nothing else to do. It was all that kept us in existence. That, and the slight sway of the airframe that told our legs that Dadda, somewhere – Dadda a million miles away – was still flying her.
The screaming gave back a little, like an army preparing for a fresh assault. Fell to a sobbing.
‘Mutti, mutti.’
And we felt another movement in the airframe, towards the tail. Something was moving there, coming slowly towards us. Kit reached down and pulled aside the curtain round his navigator’s table. I thought it odd that his little table-light was still shining. I thought it odd that it still existed at all. It belonged to the real world. He swivelled it towards the tail, and we both looked.
A man hung there, crucified.
For a moment, for me, the universe rocked on its pivot. Then I saw it was only Billy the Kid, face-mask, oxygen-hose and intercom-wires dangling down his front like entrails. His face was that white sheet again, with three holes burnt in it now: his eyes and his silently-screaming mouth. His freckles stood out like blood splashes. And he wasn’t crucified; his arms were braced against the airframe to hold himself up. As we watched, he drew in a shuddering breath and screamed, silently, again. He wasn’t looking at us; he wasn’t looking anywhere.
Somehow, Kit started towards him. Immediately, Billy let go of one side of the airframe. He had a hatchet in his hand; the little hatchet many rear-gunners carry to hack their way out of the turret, in case of a crash. I wanted to run away. But a world without Kit was unthinkable, and Kit was still advancing on Billy.
The hatchet came up; the hatchet came down, on Kit’s head. Fortunately, it struck the upper airframe stringers in its descent and lost most of its force. Kit grabbed Billy’s wrist, and the next second we were all three struggling on the Duralumin walkway, a mass of sheepskin and bony, painful knees, air-hoses and radio-cables. Then we had hold
of one of his arms each, and the hatchet was lying at our feet. Kit kicked it from where he lay, and it vanished into the darkness. He grimaced at me; his face-mask had worked loose. Then he nodded up the fuselage to where the rest bed was bolted. Rest bed, ha-ha. Lie-and-groan bed; bleed-your-life-away-and-your-mates-can’t-stop-it bed. We got Billy there. He was no longer struggling very hard. His mouth was open and there were long strands of saliva festooning it.
‘Hold him down,’ Kit mouthed.
I buried my head in Billy’s shoulder, wrapped my arms and legs round his and clung on. Now I sensed Dadda was bending over us; I felt better. God, was it Matt doing the ground-hopping? Could Matt really fly this crate like that? I saw the dim glow from the navigator’s light glinting on the syringe in Dadda’s hand; saw the needle jab into Billy’s rounded, straining backside. His shirt and trousers had come apart, and I could see the pale, shining, girlish skin of his back. Billy stiffened at the pain of the needle, then almost immediately began to relax. Next second, there was an agonizing bee-sting in my own backside.
‘Hey,’ I shouted, ‘that’s not fair!’
‘Sorry,’ mouthed Dadda. ‘Meant for him.’ He pointed at Billy.
I was getting all weak and warm and drowsy, as the morphia took over. I was frightened I would be too weak to hold Billy; but he had had his jab first: he was even drowsier than me.
That was the last I knew. As the terrible screaming started again, I slipped away from it into warm darkness.
When I came round there was no noise but the roar of the engines. Billy the Kid was still out cold, snoring gently. I wondered who had drawn the great big blue marks under his eyes with a pencil. Kit was sitting at his table, still wearily doing his sums. He had no need of his navigator’s light now, because sunshine – early, horizontal sunshine – was streaming in through our dirty triangular windows. I made some kind of movement with my arm, and at the third time he saw and came over.
‘That noise has stopped,’ I mouthed.
‘Halfway across the North Sea. Got weaker and weaker. Then it . . . seemed to give up.’ He held up five fingers. ‘Five minutes to Oadby.’
‘Any damage?’
Kit tried to smile, and gave up. The guy with the blue pencil who’d been drawing on Billy’s face had been drawing on Kit’s too. With a slightly shaky hand, he gave me a flask-top of cold coffee and said, ‘No damage. Not a bullet hole. I’ve checked.’
‘We’re going to get this home?’
‘Dadda says this crate will always get home.’
‘What d’you mean?’
But Kit got up and hurried away forward. I heard the note of the engines change, and felt the aircraft tremble as the flaps went down.
Dadda’s landing was a perfect three-pointer; never a bounce. We shook Billy awake, got out on to the tarmac and stood round and peed on the tail-wheel. I caught myself wishing our pee was pure sulphuric acid, and that the tail-wheel would dissolve and all S-Sugar with it.
The ground-crew sergeant came up, glancing at wings, tail, everything.
‘Good trip?’
‘Piece of cake,’ said Dadda. He grinned; dried-up saliva wrinkled his lips into strange patterns. ‘But the RT needs seeing to. And there’s no point in arguing this time – it’s smashed to hell.’
Kit actually laughed, even if he couldn’t quite finish it.
The debriefing WAAF kept asking me what happened, and I kept on saying, ‘Nothing. Piece of cake.’
I came up slowly out of the depths of sleep. The barrack-room was cold and empty. Waking up was a mistake. I’d been happy asleep.
I went to the window. Autumn Fenland mist. Boundary fence. Mud this side and mud beyond, fading away into infinity. Through the fence a few dirty, ragged sheep stared at me, chewing. I despised them for their keen desire to stay alive. Personally, for the first time, I wished to be dead. Oh, not your Pearly Gates opening and St Peter waiting to pin a gong on you. I’d settle for lovely, black-velvety nothing. Not see, not feel, not think. I tried to remember Clitheroe Grammar School, Mum and Dad, and a girl called Betty who wrote to me every week. But the memory of them stayed grey and remote, like photographs in a tattered copy of the Daily Mail, blowing around the dispersals.
This, I thought, without much real interest, was the effect of flying in Blackham’s Wimpey. This was the huddled, inert state that Reaper’s crew had reached, and Edwards’, just before they got the chop. In this state, the chop was inevitable. Dieter Gehlen, dead, was claiming more victims than ever. He was deadlier in Blackham’s Wimpey than he had ever been in a Junkers 88. To the glory of the Fatherland. And there was no reason why he should not continue to claim victims. Blackham’s Wimpey, as Dadda had observed, would always come home. Probably unmarked. It could fly two more whole tours. How Gehlen’s ghost managed to keep flak away, and other Jerry night-fighters, God alone knew. But obviously if Blackham’s Wimpey bought it, Gehlen’s ghost bought it too. And that would not be in the scheme of things . . .
I realized that what I was thinking was quite insane. The only comfort was that we six could huddle in a group, sharing a common insanity. For a bit. Like Reaper’s lot; like Edwards’ . . . the names tolled in my head like a funeral bell that would not stop.
Why hadn’t Reaper reported it? He had, the only way anyone would believe. He had told the ground-crew sergeant to see to the RT. Something was wrong with it. Oh my, was something wrong with it! But what else could Reaper have done? Told Groupie his squadron contained a haunted bomber? That would have got him one of two rewards: either sitting flying a bomber in Colchester mental hospital, like Blackham, or else found to be LMF – lacking in moral fibre – reduced to the rank of AC2 – the lowest rank of erk – and put on cleaning out the bogs on your own station, with all your mates either trying to look you in the face or trying not to look you in the face. That crafty bastard Gehlen had it all taped. My eyes filled with tears of helpless rage. I’d like to kill Gehlen, for what he was doing. But that wasn’t possible, was it?
The barrack-room door was flung open with a bang, making me jump a yard in the air. I hadn’t realized I had that amount of life left in me. It was Kit. He didn’t look as if he wished he was dead. Instead, he looked slightly and gleefully insane. I retired into my pit, and he sat on the end of it, swinging his flying-boots.
‘You look terrible,’ he said.
‘I feel terrible.’
‘What you reckon to last night, then?’
‘Ghost?’ I said feebly.
‘That bastard knew what he was doing.’ He spoke as if Gehlen was a living man. ‘He kept on playing himself different ways, for maximum possible effect. Like a dirty old man flashing himself to schoolgirls in the park.’
‘How did you cope?’
‘Oh, we all got in a bunch. I stood behind Dadda’s seat, with a hand on Matt’s shoulder. Being three together wasn’t so bad. It was being alone in the tail that did for poor old Billy.’
‘What about Paul in the front?’
‘We kept kicking him up the backside. That kept him going. And he popped away at the light flak and searchlights. He didn’t hit a thing, but he said it relieved his feelings. He’s out there now, fiddling with his motorbike. Doing wheelies up the runway and driving the WO mad.’
‘It must help to be mad,’ I said. ‘How’s Billy?’
‘No worse than you. He’s still with us; just.’ He stared out of the window. Then he said, ‘That bloody thing didn’t scare Dadda at all, you know. All Dadda said was “poor soul”. That’s what kept me going. That, and the fact that the bastard went on too long. When he was starting to fade, at the end, he sounded like a worn-out gramophone record. I got up enough nerve to walk to the back of the crate after that. You and Billy were curled up like a pair of babes in the wood. I even took a spell in the back turret. Didn’t see anything. After that thing, what’s a Jerry fighter?’
‘Well, Gehlen’s done for me,’ I said. ‘Like he did for Reaper and Edwards . . .’
K
it gave me a long hard stare. ‘I’ve got news for you, son. Just had a report on C-Charlie. She’s in need of two new engines. Next time we go out, we go out in Blackham’s again.’
My world fell in. I didn’t think I could have felt worse, but I did. ‘I’m not going. It’s LMF for me. How do you hold a bog brush?’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Kit. ‘But d’you fancy helping me do something first? I scrounged this out of Paul’s bike.’ He pulled a stubby, flat whisky bottle out of his sagging tunic pocket. It was full of clear liquid. He let me smell it. Petrol.
‘You don’t mean—’
‘I bloody do! Burn the sod out. If S-Sugar burns up, Gehlen can waste his time haunting the aircraft knacker’s yard.’
‘You wouldn’t dare . . .’
‘Try and stop me. What can they do to us, even if they can prove it wasn’t a careless fag-end? How about three years in a nice quiet cell?’
‘Bliss,’ I said, feeling suddenly a whole lot better. ‘When?’
‘Now,’ said Kit. ‘Before the ground-crew get to work on her. Dadda brought her home on full boost; there’s hardly a cupful of petrol in her. She won’t blow up and kill anybody, not unless somebody tries to be a hero with the fire-extinguisher – and they can go and hold old Gehlen’s hand.’ His eyes still had that slightly mad shine, but I went with him. Except for Dadda, we all did, even Billy. Especially Billy.
There seemed not to be a soul about, as we walked to the dispersals across the wet, misty field. But I suppose there are always mechanics working inside the crates, and cosy, nosy buggers looking out of office windows. Which probably accounts for what happened later. You don’t normally get a complete aircrew walking out to a crate the morning after an op. S-Sugar loomed up suddenly, as if she were a ghost. From the outside, she looked just like any other Wimpey; that wedgy, faithful-doggy profile. For a moment my mind did a double-take about damaging His Majesty’s property. But Blackham’s Wimpey didn’t really belong to His Majesty any more, though of course His Majesty didn’t know it. Matt reached up and pulled down the hatch and ladder. For no particular reason, I climbed in first.
Break of Dark Page 7
